Fiction. Poetry. Cross-Genre. Slim, but with as many wildly disparate imaginative scenes and situations as a massive Pynchon novel--miners, polar bears, insurgents sweeping the desert in Toyota pickups, a detective on the trail of illegal fur traders, Venus Williams' deconstructed forehand, wild horses, blooming chrysanthemums, tadpoles eating corpses in the Euphrates, and so much more--Leslie Scalapino's FLOATS HORSE-FLOATS OR HORSE-FLOWS is a startlingly beautiful, politically engaged, poetic novel. Narrative moments arrive out of inchoate states--an alexia where unknown words create a future--and the reader is continually and unexpectedly moved by the buoyancy and breathtaking velocity of Leslie Scalapino's language. "This is a jewel book that has come out of the spagyric hinterlands of purest imagination, where it has lain for an immeasurable time alongside Burroughs's Cities of the Red Night, Hans Arp's poetry, Monkey's Journey to the West, and Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger--and it blows with the elegance of a horse--or a wolf...Virginia Woolf!"--Michael McClure.

Author Hometown: OAKLAND, CA USA



About the author: Leslie Scalapino is the author of thirty books of poetry, prose inter-genre-fiction, plays, and essays. Granary Book just published a collaborative book by artist Kiki Smith and Leslie Scalapino, titled The Animal is in the World like Water in Water. Scalapino's It's go in horizontal/Selected Poems, 1974-2006 was published by University of California Press at Berkeley in 2008. Other books of Scalapino's poetry include DAY OCEAN STATE OF STARS' NIGHT (Green Integer), a collection of eight years; ZITHER & AUTOBIOGRAPHY (Wesleyan University Press), The Tango (Granary Press), ORCHID JETSAM (Tuumba), Dahlia's Iris—Secret Autobiography and Fiction (FC2 Publishers); a reprint of the prose work DEFOE by Green Integer; and IT'S GO IN/ QUIET ILLUMINED GRASS/ LAND (The Post-Apollo Press).

Reviews:
Jason Calsyn in Tarpaulin Sky Reviews
Publishers Weekly
author site